Hypothetically Murdered

In 1931 Shostakovich wrote a full-length score for the Leningrad Music Hall, for a show that involved many of the leading entertainers of the day, as well as dancing girls, a jazz band, a dancing dog, sequences of silent film, simulated air-raids and gas attacks, a lorry, a storm, waiters and waitresses in a luxury restaurant, river nymphs and even a scene in Heaven with the Devil, the Twelve Apostles, the Archangel Gabriel and all the other angels doing a blasphemous knees-up. The show was naturally a momentary scandal and the score soon disappeared. In 1991 Gerard McBurney reconstructed from the surviving sketches a sequence of 21 of the orchestral numbers to make a hilarious sequence of gallops, saucy polkas, marches and schmoozy waltzes.

• Dmitri ShostakovichOriginal Music Composer

• Natalia de FrobervilleMashenka Kurochkin
• Artyom MishakovStopka Kurochkin
• Sergei MershinBeyburzhuyev
• German StarikovAngel
• Anna Pushvintseva-PoistogovaShowy Lady
• Eugenia ChetverikovaDancing Couple
• Denis TolmazovDancing Couple
• Lyaisan GisatullinaBarmaid
• Alexey BudrinAccordion Player